Joseph Lease's critically acclaimed books of poetry include Broken World (Coffee House Press) and Human Rights (Talisman House, forthcoming). His poem "'Broken World' (For James Assatly)" was selected for The Best American Poetry 2002 (Scribner). His poems have also been featured on NPR and published in Bay Poetics, No Gender, and elsewhere.

Donna de la Perrière is the author of True Crime (Talisman House, 2009) and the forthcoming St. Erasure (Talisman House, 2010). Her poems have appeared in No Gender: Reflections on the Life and Work of kari edwards (Litmus Press/Belladonna Books, 2009) and Bay Poetics (Faux Press, 2006). She teaches in the MFA and undergraduate creative writing programs at both California College of the Arts and San Francisco State University, and curates the Bay Area Poetry Marathon reading series at San Francisco’s The Lab gallery and performance space.

Alan Bernheimer was born a New Yorker. Coastal inclination since. Europe before the age of reason. Graduated from Yale and worked with words at various jobs. High-tech marketing for a long spell. Now solar. Bay Area resident for 30 some years. Adventures in Poetry published The Spoonlight Institute last fall. Earlier books include Billionesque and Café Isotope, both from The Figures.

Mathew Timmons has published prose, poetry and criticism in various places including: P-Queue, Flim Forum, The Physical Poets, Or, eohippus labs, Area Sneaks, Artweek, Artillery, The Magazine, X-TRA and The Encyclopedia Project. A chapbook, Lip Service (Slack Buddha), and an 800 page full color, large-format, hardbound book, CREDIT (Blanc Press), was recently published. His first full-length book, The New Poetics (Les Figues Press) and his micro-book collaboration with Marcus Civin, a particular vocabulary (P S Books) are forthcoming.

Upper Limit Los Angeles

About the Bureau

The Poetic Research Bureau is a valise fiction and portable literary service in Northeast Los Angeles.

Our living room at 951 Chung King Rd in Chinatown hosts an extended community of autodidacts and guessworkers caught up in language, inquiry and the unguarded arts. Just as it is: a community free school by day, and by night, a non-professional public forum for presentations, readings, screenings and sundry intellectual exchanges.

As an out-of-pocket California milk-crate boosterist enterprise, the PRB also serves as the irregular literary umbrella for projects such as occasional poetry journal The Germ ('97-'05), edited by Andrew Maxwell and Macgregor Card; and art-lit mag Area Sneaks, edited by Rita Gonzalez and Joseph Mosconi.

As a research bloc, the Bureau attempts to cultivate composition, publication and distribution strategies that enlarge the public domain. It favors appropriations, impersonations, 'compost' poetries, belated conversations, unprintable jokes and doodles, 'unoriginal' literature, historical thefts and pastiche. The publication emphasis is on ephemeral works, short-run magazines and folios, short-lived reprints and excerpts in print-on-demand formats, and the occasional literary fetish objects of stupidly incomparable price and value.

Several reading series are hosted at 951 CKR, and we welcome writers whose work lacks the 'commercial tendency' while harboring the bright, high-minded intentions that often lead to broad panic, righteous perversions, improbable arguments, and the ill-served cul-de-sacs of genius. The series are coordinated by the aforementioned Messrs Maxwell and Mosconi. If you're sympatico, passing through town, or need a megaphone, 50 seats and a big blank space, give us a write.